meet me in the desert

When was the last time you visited the desert?

Not one of the many old and new ones that mark the landscape of planet earth, but the one that unfolds from inside your body.

A silent space, a void. A darkness so crystalline, you could lose, and at the same time find yourself in her holding. I had the great pleasure to experience this space together with 35 other seeking souls that resonated deeply with an unusual invitation.

When Moave - Psychology in Movement called us to beautiful Slovenia to be in our bodies and explore our desert landscapes as a metaphor of deep transition, I knew this was for me. Navigating grief, moving to a new country with a new language and little social webbing to hold my partner and me in this process, I could feel my roots floating with little orientation between heaven and earth. Where to find support and patience? How to hold myself when everything seems to be crumbling? How to even start filling this blank page? The desert appeared not as an answer, but as evidence along my path. Evidence for the possibility of leaning into support as we gently find our way forward.

What we encountered there, in the void, surrounded by 30 cm of fresh snow and wrapped in the safety of lovingly prepared meals and attentive company, is hard to describe in words.

Besides the personal resonance, the work of our facilitators touched and inspired me deeply. Weaving together approaches connected to eco psychology, somatics, and systemic constellations, our hosts took us on an embodied journey that allowed us to feel our centres and connect from a grounded perspective as we would step into places of darkness and light. I am deeply impressed by their deep understanding of the nervous system and the living body, knowing how much experience it takes to speak invitations and explanations that hold the complexity and multitude of overlapping boundaries and histories.

The second day of our encounter, I suddenly realized what brought me all the way from Spain: The need for support, which turned out to be one central theme in our exploration. Over the course of the week, we found support through and in the body of the self and the collective. Following invitations to release into the invisible spider web of relations that holds us, wherever we are. Connecting to this metaphor a lot, it was beautiful to have a truly visceral experience of this, from sitting on a patch of moss surrounded by trees and singing snowflakes to lying down on a wooden floor surrounded by 35 other breathing humans with no other agenda but being. The dessert allowed many of us to transition this reality of the entangled web of life from a belief into a deeply felt experience. It brought us back to the support of our ancestors, to owning our fucking strengths, and an opening of the senses for all the messages the forest whispers our way.

Slowly landing back in my still not-so-everyday life in Galicia, I feel waves and worlds colliding in one direction. If one thing feels true and alive, it is the courage I gathered to carry this evidence forward in my life and work, speak bolder invitations to get into our bodies and let our nervous systems come back to equilibrium as we charge capacity to unfold into new possibilities. Of course, all infused by a good dose of play, imagination, humaning, and good food.

My heart is full of gratitude.

Thank you, Nayeli, Ziva, and Magda. Thank you, Smolnik & forest. Thank you to every single snowflake, and to all my human companions in the process.

Thank you, Erasmus+, for giving us the chance to be in practice and share it onwards.